First Family Game Night at Empire Games

With the arrival of July, we are pleased to announce the start of a new regular event: Family Game Night.

Family Game Night will happen every Thursday night at 6PM, and will aim to finish up by 9PM. It will be a drop-in, drop-out event where anyone is welcome to come join at any time and leave whenever they need to do so.

So, I'm sure you're asking "What is Family Game Night?"

Family Game Night is a fun night where we provide a new, interesting, family-friendly game each week for you to try out along with your friends and family. We will handle the setup, help you learn the rules, and even take care of the clean-up when it's all done!

Our first game for Family Game Night will be Splendor!

Splendor is a very easy game to learn-- most of the time, you can pick up all the rules within the first couple turns-- however it can take years to master it!

The goal of Splendor is to have the highest number of "Victory Points" at the end of the game. There are two ways to get these victory points: the first way is to buy the "Foundation Cards" by spending gems; the second way is to earn "Nobles" by acquiring the right number of these foundation cards before anyone else.

Now that you know how to win, I should tell you how to play the game. Each turn, you can take one action. You can choose any one of these actions:

Take one piece of three different color gems (ie, 1 red, 1 blue, 1 green)

Take two pieces of a single color gem -- you can only do this if there are at least four left in the stockpile

buy a foundation card by spending your gems

reserve one of the face-up cards on the board or the top card of one of the decks -- doing this will earn you one of the golden wild-card gems, which can be spent for any color

Pretty simple, right?

Now, here's the cool part about buying foundation cards: every foundation card you have reduces the price of other gem cards by one of that color. So let's say you buy that diamond card on the bottom left; now if you want to buy the sapphire card to the right of it, you only have to pay a ruby, an emerald, and an onyx, since the diamond card covers the diamond cost! Any time someone buys a foundation card, make sure to replace it with another card of the same level.

It's also important to talk about reserving cards. When you reserve a card, you take the card you want as well as a gold wildcard token, either placing the reserved card face down in front of you or holding it in your hand. Even when there are no wildcard gems left, you can still reserve a card -- you just won't get a wildcard gem. In addition, each player can only have 3 reserved cards at a time, and the only way to reserve more cards is to buy the cards you've reserved. Keep in mind, this is also the only way to get wildcard gems, as you can't take them along with regular gems!

The noble tokens are another important aspect of the game, as they each give the holder 3 victory points. The noble tokens, unlike the foundation cards, cannot be bought and instead are earned by the first player to have the right number and colors of foundation cards.

Finally, the game enters the final round as soon as someone reaches 15 or more victory points. However, the game isn't over immediately! Every player gets to have the same number of turns. This means that if the player who went first gets to 15 victory points, all the other players get to have another turn to try and surpass them. Once the round ends, the player with the highest number of victory points wins!

Now that you know how to play Splendor, be sure to be here on Thursday, July 6th at 6PM to try it out!